This week, the youth group and I are on a mission trip in Nashville, TN. We do just about all of our work in the morning and early afternoon which leaves our evenings open for hanging out, playing games, and visiting ancient temples devoted to idol-worship. Or at least visiting replicas thereof. Here in Nashville is a full-scale replica of the Parthenon, a temple devoted to the Greek goddess, Athena. The actual Parthenon residence in Athens, Greece; a city named after the Greek goddess Athena.
You might be wondering why I would take our Christian youth group to a rebuilt temple to a false god. Well, for one, it’s really neat to see the sheer size of the place and to imagine what I would have taken to build it 2,400 years ago and to imagine the impact it would have had on people who were not used to such large structures. But mainly I took the youth group there because I thought it would be a great setting to have a devotional about idol-worship.
In Acts 17, Paul is in Athens and it says that “he saw that the city was full of idols” (17:16). As we stood in the shadow of the Parthenon, I asked the youth group to identify the idols that are filling our city. What things do people worship? What things do people devote themselves to? What things do people make sacrifices for? The two main things they responded with were:
Entertainment (TV, phones, social media, etc.)
Fashion/Image (The park surrounding the Parthenon was filled with people who were quite inappropriately dressed)
However, the list could go on and on. Even though we don’t have names and backstories for the gods in our modern society, we still worship them often without even realizing that it has become more important than God’s Word. The ancient Athenians worshiped so many gods that they even had an alter built ‘To the unknown god.’ And when they brought Paul in to ask him about what he was preaching, he told them that the ‘unknown god’, what you recognize as being missing from your life, is actually the one true God; the ruler of everyone and every thing and will one day judge the world. At this, some people mocked him. But some people listened. And some people believed him.
We, like Paul, are standing in a society filled with idols and are called to take a stand for the one true God. We are called to recognize that all of those gods were created by men, but we serve the only God who wasn’t.
Today, may you take your stand.